Online June Annual Meeting 2025 Program Book

This paper analyzes the use of Google Reviews in the Persian Gulf to search for, rate, and review mosques and other Muslim houses of worship. Focusing on mosques in four cities – Abu Dhabi, Doha, Kuwait City, and Riyadh – it uses Google review recommendations to identify five mosques in each city, examining the posted ratings and reviews. The analysis shows how reviews braid together religious users’ goals of finding a location for prayer and of providing guidance to fellow believers; and with religious and non-religious users’ reflections on visiting these mosques as tourists. it argues that reviews form a communal space of shared belief as well as a space that reflects and amplifies the importance of ‘mosque tourism’ as a pious and cultural practice. More broadly, it sheds light on broader trends in Gulf Muslim religious life-worlds, and how they take shape across a continuum of online and offline experiences. 

Heeding Sylvia Wynter’s call to go beyond the contemporary “descriptive statement” of being Man that stands on the racist/classist/patriarchal/colonial/White-Christian centric ontology (Wynter, 2003), this paper analyzes the sociopolitical and religious perspectives of the indigenous community in North Kendeng Mountains of Central Java Province that stand at the intersection of Islam and Saminism (an indigenous religion established within the crucible of anti-colonial struggles in 19th century Indonesia). The paper proposes to see the Islam/Saminism matrix in the life of the North Kendeng indigenous community. It looks at how Islam/Saminism is an affirmation of being human – instead of the hegemonic “descriptive statement” of Man - that is always in relation with Ibu Bumi (lit. Mother Earth). In this way, the paper argues that the Islam/Saminism matrix provides an ontotheological conception of ‘human’ in opposition to what Wynter called as the master code of “Man2,” and serves as an epistemological foundation for being human.

Scholarship on modern Islam has largely focused on Egypt and South Asia, overlooking Palestine’s intellectual history. This paper integrates Palestine into broader Islamic networks by examining three late Ottoman Nabulsi ulama: Yousef al-Nabahani, Bakr al-Tamimi, and Abdullah Sufan al-Qaddumi. These scholars, rooted in established religious lineages, defended traditionalist thought against reformist, missionary, and Wahhabi challenges during Sultan Abdulhamid II’s reign. Their efforts centered on preserving Ash‘ari and Maturidi theology, traditional four schools of law, and Sufi traditions. Applying network theory, this study demonstrates that their discourse evolved through intellectual exchanges across Istanbul, Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo, though Palestinian ulama placed unique emphasis on countering Christian missionary activities. By positioning them within the Hamidian traditionalist network, this paper argues that Palestinian scholars were not passive provincial figures but active participants in shaping Ottoman religious and political discourse, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of Islamic traditionalism in the Ottoman empire.

This paper investigates the growing interest in Sufism among young Egyptians after the 2011 uprising. It is based on 63 interviews with middle-class Muslim Egyptians in 2018 and 2019 and ethnographic research from 2021 to 2023. Most interlocutors believed that the revolution failed to bring about the political and socioeconomic goals they hoped to achieve. Despair became the norm amongst these youth. As a result, while some started questioning religious authorities and practices and others turned to nonbelief, several interviewees turned to Sufism to maintain a relationship with God that was not reliant on external markers of piety that others can judge. Some followed a traditional Sufi path, while others followed practitioners who incorporated teachings from Eastern wisdoms and New Age teachings. This paper explores how religious sensibilities change due to political upheaval, with Sufism being seen, by some, as a last recourse before losing faith in God or Islam.   

Eusebius of Caesarea (ca. 260–339/340) noted that by the 320s, many orthodox Christian communities in the Roman East had accepted the Catholic Epistles, including James, into their liturgies. This marked a shift, as earlier Church leaders had questioned their authenticity. While modern scholars have debated the factors influencing this Eastern reception, suggesting everyone from Augustine, Jerome, to even Athanasius of Alexandria, this paper, however, argues that Origen (ca. 185–254) played a key role in establishing the Epistle of James as scripture. Origen was the first orthodox scholar to cite James explicitly as scripture and even defended its apostolic authority against opposition. Through his influence on his students, Origen likely contributed to the epistle’s growing acceptance in the Roman East, bridging the gap between its early marginalization and its later recognition by Eusebius’s time. This paper reassesses Origen’s role in the Eastern reception of the Epistle of James.

This paper examines two Coptic Orthodox rites—the medieval Rite of the Jar and contemporary exorcism sessions—as improvisational extensions of the baptismal liturgy. Though separated by centuries, both rites operate as liturgical responses to the porous boundaries between Christians and Muslims in Egypt. The Rite of the Jar, used to reconcile those deemed apostates or those who transgressed intercommunal sexual norms, reflects a medieval ecclesial effort to police communal boundaries while avoiding the redundancy of rebaptism. Contemporary public exorcisms, by contrast, invert the logic of hidden liturgy, projecting the proclamation of Christ’s lordship into contested public space. Both rites reveal how liturgical performance becomes a mode of theological agency and boundary work in minoritized religious settings. Drawing on ritual theory and historical anthropology, this paper argues that these rites improvise upon baptismal grammar to negotiate identity, perform resistance, and mediate the tension between ecclesial self-understanding and interfaith proximity.

Armenian liturgical services, such as the "Blessing of the Fields," make a link between community and place explicit. The embodied, sensorial experience of liturgy makes a particular Christian community present in a specific place. It also presents the fullest expression of that community's theology. This paper explores a handful of Armenian Apostolic Christian liturgical services that focus on blessings of fields, crops, and cultivated land in order to argue that they connect community and land in a distinctive liturgical vision that is both ecological and indigenous. The paper argues that the liturgical practice of the Armenian Apostolic Church can, in the instances described, function as an indigenous ecotheology. It does so, the paper suggests, in ways that can advance discussions both of ecotheology and global indigeneity.

This paper examines the depiction of the Eucharist in the canons of Jacob of Edessa (ca. 640–708)—a seventh-century Syrian bishop who remains celebrated by the Syriac Orthodox Church today. Jacob’s writings offer unique insights into the life of the non-Chalcedonian church immediately following the Arab conquests and the rise of Islam. While Jacob was notoriously known for his strict leadership and unbending policies throughout his time as bishop, he is remembered today as a gifted linguist and faithful leader. His stringent supervision of the church prompted careful consideration about the role of the Eucharist within the Syriac Orthodox tradition, thereby helping to solidify and define the church’s core beliefs during its early stages of identity formation. 

The history of the Protestant Church in Germany (Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland, EKD), a federation of regional Lutheran, Reformed, and United denominations, provides a counterpoint to the recent resurgence of Christian nationalism across the U.S. and Europe. Following widespread Protestant support for the Nazi dictatorship, the EKD became a locus for post-1945 movements to restrain state power and pursue reconciliation with Germany’s wartime enemies. My presentation argues that initiatives toward ecumenical dialogue during the years around 1960, both among Protestants across the Iron Curtain and between Protestants and Jews in West Germany, became key drivers of this transformation. Rather than a simple story of deradicalization, however, I propose that ecumenism and Christian nationalism remained entangled. Even as postwar ecumenical initiatives challenged exclusionary doctrines of national salvation, they reinscribed a longstanding tenet of German Protestant nationalism: the conviction that the Protestant confession served as the source of Germans' shared political values.

The war waged by Russia against Ukraine has profoundly reshaped the country’s religious landscape, intensifying interconfessional and state-church relations. This research examines the ongoing process of delegitimizing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) affiliated with Russia and the broader decolonization of Ukraine’s religious sphere. While state measures to limit Moscow-linked religious influence are seen as essential for national security, they have also raised concerns about religious freedoms. The mass transition of parishes to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) reflects both spiritual and political motivations. Additionally, the growing role of the OCU in military chaplaincy underscores its expanding societal influence. Internationally, the Russian Orthodox Church faces isolation, further shifting Orthodox dynamics. This study explores the tensions between national security, religious autonomy, and international norms, analyzing how the war is reshaping Ukraine’s confessional identity while raising complex questions about faith, politics, and decolonization.

This paper examines Rosemary Radford Ruether’s feminist theology in relation to the sex-gender distinction, arguing that while she maintains the stability of biological sex, her framework struggles to separate sex from gender. By incorporating insights from contemporary biological studies, Ruether’s emphasis on sexed embodiment can be maintained while avoiding rigid gender binaries and accounting for transgender embodiment. The paper explores her interpretation of Ancient religious myths and their symbolic gender roles, foregrounding inconsistencies in her treatment of gendered symbolism versus human gender constructs. It engages with biological research to challenge essentialist views of sex and gender and modify Ruether’s view. This leads to the suggestion that, when symbolizing the divine through sexed/gendered qualities, this should be done by figuring them as a “scatterplot” of female-typical and male-typical traits. Ruether’s revised perspective, informed by biology, offers a middle ground between Marcella Althaus-Reid’s constructivist approach and Pope John Paul II’s essentialism. 

This paper proposes a multi-sited discussion of contemporary placemaking practices along Jewish heritage routes in Europe and the Mediterranean, drawing on original ethnographic research conducted at archaeological immersion pools (mikva’ot) in historic Jewish quarters. Now preserved by museums and municipal authorities as sites of national cultural and historical patrimony, hundreds of former immersion pools are largely memorialized as sacred spaces. Theatrical reenactments, graphic novels, and holographic projections featuring nude or semi-nude women bathing in stepped pools in France and Catalonia, for example, speak to deeply held fantasies of the “Jewess” descending to her mysterious bathing rites in distant times. 

This paper throws light on the boundaries of archaeological knowledge production vis-à-vis modern interpretations of the historic built environment and the generative but considerable limitations of ethnographic methodologies in attempting to reconstruct the phenomenological and embodied experiences of purity rites in ancient contexts.

Fertilized embryos, especially those that are “left over” from assisted reproductive technologies, as well as remains after medication abortions at home, have become a politicized part of social, cultural, as well as religious life of reproduction in the United States. What happens when the way we view waste, and specifically “remains,” in a Western, Christian society, like the United States, becomes imbued with discourses of religious veracity, nationalism, and population control? In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille describes blood and tissue from the vagina (menstrual blood, birth, etc.) as dejected by Western society –we are disgusted by and scared of it, but at the same time we do not know what to do with it. Based on this notion, this project begins to uncover why, in our modern society, the fear of “remains” begins to control the ways we police pregnancy and reproductive capacities, through both religious and moral discourses. 

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